Discussion on writing and publishing novels and short fiction

Dialogue in fiction

A commenter asked, a couple of days ago, about how to format dialogue in a manuscript. Much of the answer is in this section of Write a Novel, my online self-guided course.

But as long as I'm thinking about it, here are some general suggestions:

In North America, we set off dialogue with "double quotes." In Britain and many other Commonwealth countries, we set it off with 'single quotes.' Note that periods (and commas) go inside the close quote.

We can introduce dialogue, and identify the speaker, in several ways:

David said: "That's a terrible idea."

David said, "That's a terrible idea."

"That's a terrible idea," David said.

"That," said David, "is a terrible idea."

In general, David said: is a bit rare. Most writers seem to prefer David said, as an introduction. When the reference to the speaker comes after the quotation, the final sentence of the quote ends with a comma and close quote before explaining who's talking. If you choose to interrupt the dialogue with the explanation, the dialogue that follows said David doesn't take a capital letter.

A long-winded speaker may go on for two or more paragraphs. In that case, we use the quotation marks to indicate the start of each paragraph, but the end of only the final paragraph:

"That's a terrible idea.

"For one thing, it would be really expensive.

"For a second thing, I would probably get killed."

The missing close-quotes tell your readers that the same person is still talking.

Every time you do include a David said or a Sarah replied, you're probably wasting your readers' time. The characters' manners of speech should be so distinctive that we instantly understand who's talking. Maybe you'll need an explanation at the beginning of the exchange between David and Sarah, but once they get going, we notice that David and Sarah don't sound anything like one another.

Some writers, lacking confidence in their readers' intelligence, will make their characters address each other by name at every opportunity:

"David, why did you come home so late tonight?"

"Sarah, you're always nagging me!"

"David, it's not nagging! I'm worried about you!"

"Give me a break, Sarah!"

If you and your sweetie talk that way, don't come to me—go find a counsellor. But do keep the he said-she said expressions to an absolute minimum.

Look again at that last exchange of dialogue. The question marks and exclamation marks (just one of each) go inside the close-quotes. They convey the tone of each speaker's statement. But if your characters are always yelling at each other, that should be clear from the content of the dialogue, not from the exclamation marks.

And how do we indent dialogue? Just like any other paragraph. A half-inch indent should be fine. Each time a different person speaks, we indent again. So every time David speaks, he starts with a new indented paragraph. When Sarah answers, new indented paragraph.

No one taught me this. When I was reading pulp science fiction magazines almost 60 years ago, I noticed how they displayed and punctuated dialogue. When I started writing my own SF on my mother's portable typewriter, I imitated the usage of the magazines. And when I started sending in my manuscripts, the editors were very happy with them because they didn't need line-by-line corrections.

Editors are wonderful people, and if you give them almost no work to do, they'll think you're wonderful too.

Comments

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